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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Indignant Astronaut Denies Taking Moon Rock

Washington Post

Apollo 12 astronaut Alan L. Bean, the fourth man to walk on the moon, Saturday disputed the claims of a New York auction house that is selling what it advertised as a lunar rock obtained through an astronaut.

The firm acknowledged there is an error in its catalog.

“It’s just not true,” said Bean, who flew the Apollo 12 mission with astronauts Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon in November 1969. None of the mission’s crew would ever “keep any of the samples,” Bean said indignantly. “They are the property of the United States government.”

The rock will go under the hammer at Phillips Fine Art Auctioneers in Manhattan next Saturday, part of a large “natural history” auction that includes dinosaur eggs, miscellaneous fossils, prehistoric shark jaws and the skeleton of an Ice Age cave bear.

The catalog describes item No. 127A as “a lunar rock specimen” that was “returned to Earth by the Apollo 12 Mission” and later given to a now-deceased executive at White-Westinghouse “by an astronaut who was a close personal friend … as a token of NASA’s gratitude for his contributions to nutritional engineering for the space program.” The rock is being sold by the executive’s sons, Ron and Brian Trochelmann.

David Herskowitz, who organized the auction for Phillips, acknowledged Saturday that the catalog description was wrong. He said another museum official prepared the text after talking with the lawyer for the Trochelmann family and, in the rush to get ready for the auction, that official had failed to proofread the item.

“It was a misunderstanding,” Herskowitz said. “The moon rock was returned by the Apollo 12 mission, but we admit it did not come directly from the astronauts’ hands” to the Trochelmann family. According to the catalog, the rock was examined by geologist Robert Curtis Walter of the Institute of Human Origins in Berkeley, Calif., who estimated its age at 60 million years, determined that it was not of terrestrial origin and concluded that it was a lunar sample that had been “severely and unusually altered by multiple meteoric impacts.”

The rock, “in a fitted, aluminum carrying case,” is “accompanied by a video tape of never-before-seen footage of the astronauts of the Apollo 11 and 12 missions,” according to Phillips.

Bean, 63, said Saturday from Houston that for astronauts to keep moon rocks or give them away as gifts “would not be the right stuff.”